Marco Institucional de Referencia - No. 006 suscrito el 18 de febrero de 2014, fecha desde la c

M. No. 006 suscrito el 18 de febrero de 2014, fecha desde la cual entró en vigencia

2.5 Marco Institucional de Referencia

M

AGIC

, I

LLUSION

& T

ECHNOLOGY

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.¹

Throughout the nineteenth century and beyond, city centres saw the side-by-side existence of all varieties of spectacle for purposes of entertainment, scientific or spiritual demonstration, whose boundaries were more fluid than we would perhaps imagine. This chapter explores the crossover between ancient Egypt and fin de siècle magic and illusion, with tropes and conventions exchanged between a variety of discourses: stage magic, Spiritualist demonstrations, photography and early moving pictures. There is a high degree of reciprocity between these discourses. Not only does ancient Egypt impact upon these media, these media in turn can be read as influencing fiction that deal with themes of the supernatural or the illusory. The city-based technologies of magic and illusion were undergoing radical changes towards the end of the nineteenth century, and these cutting-edge developments contributed to the broader association between ancient Egypt and contemporary modernity, specifically in scientific, pseudoscientific and occult fields. Firstly, this chapter

examines the Spiritualist séance and magic performances. Whether stage conjuring or real occult ritual, the apparitions and mysterious lights, sounds and sensations

associated with these performances were projected onto scenes of ancient Egyptian

1 Arthur C. Clarke, Profiles of the Future (London: Harper & Row, 1973), p. 21.

magic. It then moves on to discuss technologies that were used to investigate spirit materialisations – namely, photography – and the technologies of entertainment which were used to create and project virtual images, including the magic lantern and early moving picture cameras.

One major difference between categories of genuine occult practice and stage conjuring is a question of perceived authenticity, directly related to Michael Saler’s concept of the ironic imagination. An audience enjoys stage magic by ironically imagining it to be real even though the performer’s methods are known to be trickery, occurring well within the reassuring limits of known scientific laws. A

temporary tongue-in-cheek belief in magic as the true explanation behind the illusion is possible because the performer’s true method is not immediately apparent;

through sleight of hand, misdirection, optical illusion or else with the use of specialist equipment, an audience can enjoy being deceived. Demonstrations claiming to be truly supernatural are much more problematic because they split the spectators or participants into believers and disbelievers. It is worth pointing out that, unlike the stage conjuror who knew the truth behind the tricks, not every Spiritualist medium was consciously deceiving their audience.² To complicate things further, the many similarities between séance phenomena and magic tricks resulted in mediums and magicians being confused with each other on a number of occasions.³ Reciprocal accusations were common, in which magicians claimed that mediums were frauds, and mediums alleged that magicians were harnessing the same supernatural powers

2 Janet Oppenheim, The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850-1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 7.

3 Ibid., pp. 24-25.

that they were, but presenting them as something ordinary.⁴ Thus, boundaries of supposedly real and false magic were often broken down.

As Saler notes, although magic was perceived as something unknowably ancient, it also simultaneously came to express modernity through its fashionability, the audience’s hunger for novelty and new technological developments that facilitated innovative tricks.⁵ Simone Natale observes that, of the many features that stage magic and Spiritualist séances had in common, ‘innovation and novelty’ were key to the success of both.⁶ Audiences were eager to see something that they had not

experienced before. Public interest in Spiritualism reached its peak in the late nineteenth century, stimulated by the unusual phenomena that the most celebrated mediums were able to produce, with London being particularly notable for the concentration of its Spiritualist associations.⁷ The modernity inherent to late nineteenth-century magic and Spiritualism experienced as metropolitan pursuits is transposed onto depictions of ancient Egypt, while ancient Egypt itself lends

credibility to the modern. Often demonstrated as a curious mingling of the Spiritualist séance and the stage magic performance, depictions of ancient Egyptian occultism relate back to contemporary notions of illusion, with novel tricks and phenomena essential to securing the reputation of the medium or stage magician evident.

Virtual images of disembodied spirits were being experimented with and investigated through new technologies. Photography, magic lanterns and early

4 Ibid., p. 26.

5 Michael Saler, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 12.

6 Simone Natale, ‘The Medium on the Stage: Trance and Performance in Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism’, Early Popular Visual Culture, 9.3 (2011), 239-255 (p. 249).

7 Oppenheim, Other World, pp. 28, 49.

moving pictures are just a few examples of technologies that were being put to illusory purposes. Michael Mangan observes that optical illusions used for scientific demonstrations including ‘Pepper’s Ghost’ found their way into theatrical and magical performances, particularly in London venues. A technique based on reflections in angled glass, a translucent image appearing and disappearing as a light source brightens and dims, Pepper’s Ghost invaded both lecture halls and theatres as an illusion at once instructive and captivating. Mangan emphasises that ‘as a theatrical device its function was to produce that most unscientific of effects – a ghost. What started out as a scientific demonstration of Enlightenment rationalism turned into a producer of the irrational’.⁸ There was perhaps a more reciprocal exchange of ideas between these different fields than Mangan implies. Scientists and debunkers were attracted to psychic phenomena and the challenge of proving how these effects could be achieved, to the delight of similarly minded audience members. Pepper later exhibited his techniques at Piccadilly’s Egyptian Hall, known for its magic displays that were often explicitly intended to expose the techniques put to use by fraudulent mediums. The programme for Pepper’s show drew upon the mystery of ancient Egypt, situating his illusion within an ancient tradition that instead emphasised the veracity of true magic, rather than illusion or legerdemain that his show was actually demonstrating.

Other similar illusions at the Egyptian Hall included Stodare’s Sphinx, in which angled glass produced an effect of making the head of the magician’s accomplice – made up to look like that of the Sphinx of Giza – appear dismembered. While it may

8 Michael Mangan, Performing Dark Arts: A Cultural History of Conjuring (Bristol: Intellect Books, 2007), p. 125.

seem unsurprising that magic acts at the Egyptian Hall drew upon the architecture of their setting to add a frisson of the ancient and mystical, the style appears to have been more widespread. The connections between the iconography of ancient Egypt and that of stage magic were so strong that by the early twentieth century it became common for Egyptian symbolism to feature on posters for magic performances.

Influences ranged from the subtle use of Egyptian gods as detail on apparatus,

through to extensive Egyptianised architecture, or even the depiction of a glamorous assistant in ancient Egyptian costume. In 1902, the first edition of a new

magic-themed periodical which drew upon ancient Egypt’s mystical glamour was published;

its name was The Sphinx.

Aside from the demonstration of illusions at the Egyptian Hall, magicians John Nevil Maskelyne and George Alfred Cooke performed shows that exposed the mechanisms behind faked Spiritualist phenomena, breaking down the boundaries between categories of magic: that which is witnessed as a performance and that which is supposedly a demonstration of the supernatural.⁹ The kinds of activities that they attempted to replicate and explain were the most controversial and convincing wonders of the séance, summarised by the author and member of the Society for Psychical Research Frank Podmore in 1897:

Inexplicable sounds; the alteration of the weight of bodies; the

movement of chairs, tables and other heavy objects, and the playing of musical instruments without contact or connection of any kind; the levitation of human beings; the appearance of strange luminous

9 Stephen Herbert and Luke McKernan (eds.), Who’s Who of Victorian Cinema: A Worldwide Survey (London: British Film Institute, 1996), p. 92; Mangan, Dark Arts, p. 4.

substances; the appearance of hands apparently not attached to any body; writing not produced by human agency; the appearance of a materialised spirit-form.¹⁰

The programmes for Maskelyne and Cooke’s debunking performances, which ran from 1873 to 1904, like those of Pepper, often emphasised the ancient Egyptian style of the Hall itself, rather than the kinds of illusions that were employed (Figure 2.1).

This, and the Hall’s décor, lent an exotic tone to the proceedings, and played upon the common perception that ancient Egypt was the birthplace of magic.¹¹ Although by this point ancient Egypt had enjoyed this reputation for hundreds of years,

discoveries such as that of the Westcar Papyrus in the early 1820s reinforced the idea of ancient Egyptian sorcery as being unparalleled.¹² The late Victorian magical revival was largely devoted to the rediscovery of the occult wisdom of ancient Egypt’s priests and necromancers such as the magician of the Westcar Papyrus whose peers,

according to the Bible, had powers that could rival God’s own miracles.¹³ Lynn Parramore points out that the Ouija board, one method by which the spirits could apparently be contacted, had another name in this period: the ‘Egyptian luck board’.¹⁴ Ancient Egypt was also often perceived to be the home of illusory stage magic. As The Boy’s Own Conjuring Book (1895) avows, ‘sleight of hand, tricks of the

10 Frank Podmore, Studies in Psychical Research (London: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1897), p. 13.

11 Elliott Colla, Conflicted Antiquities: Egyptology, Egyptomania, Egyptian Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 21; Robert Hutton, The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 178.

12 Mangan, Dark Arts, pp. 1-6. Part of the document describes a magician, Dedi, who can behead and revive animals, a power achieved through devotion to the gods.

13 Kerry Muhlestein, ‘European Views of Egyptian Magic and Mystery: A Cultural Context for the Magic Flute’, BYU Studies, 43.3 (2004), 137-48 (p. 139); Roger Luckhurst, The Mummy’s Curse: A True History of a Dark Fantasy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 213.

14 Lynn Parramore, Reading the Sphinx: Ancient Egypt in Nineteenth-Century Literary Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 96.

Fig. 2.1. Programme for one of Maskelyne and Cooke’s shows at the Egyptian Hall (1887) © The British Library Board (Evan.96)

tongue by which the word was kept to the ear, but broken to the hope, and various miraculous deceptions, were the means by which the priests of Egypt, Greece, and Rome, used to subjugate mankind’.¹⁵

The Egyptian Hall also became one of London’s major moving picture venues, and the second cinema in the country, showing its first films (often incorporated into magic acts) in the spring of 1896.¹⁶ Its influence on two pioneering filmmakers is clear: Walter R. Booth who had previously worked there as a stage magician and Georges Méliès who was a frequent customer both employed ancient Egyptian imagery alongside magic and illusion in their moving pictures.¹⁷ Elaborate ancient Egyptian themed props and sets can be found in Booth’s Haunted Curiosity Shop (1901), and Méliès’s Cléopâtre (1899), Le Monstre (1903) and Les hallucinations du baron de Münchhausen (1911). Using techniques that epitomised technological

advancement in the era, their focus on ancient Egypt and magic reveals just one of the ways in which modernity and Egyptian antiquity were brought together in the period, and perhaps themselves contribute to the combination of these concepts in the

popular imagination.

That Méliès referred to one of his techniques as ‘spirit photography’ is revealing.

The method of using double-exposure to give the illusion of translucency is the direct successor of a similar practice found in fake spirit photographs, whereby people or

15 The Boy’s Own Conjuring Book: Being a Complete Handbook of Parlour Magic (New York: Dick and Fitzgerald, 1859), p. 13.

16 Herbert and McKernan, Victorian Cinema, p. 92; Chris Elliott, Egypt in England (Swindon: English Heritage, 2012), p. 42.

17 Herbert and McKernan, Victorian Cinema, pp. 28, 92; Mangan, Dark Arts, p. 117; David Huckvale, Ancient Egypt in the Popular Imagination (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co, 2012), p. 7.

objects could be made to appear ghostly and indistinct.¹⁸ Using the same vocabulary as those who supposedly photographed the spirit world, Méliès addressed the close relationship between science, illusion and the supernatural, and the techniques shared by both those investigating and those claiming to be able to produce occult images. Indeed, there appears to have been a direct thematic conversation taking place not just between the worlds of the virtual image, but in a variety of cultural contexts including contemporary literature.

The Séance and Stage Magic

The séance and stage magic were, in some respects, very similar performances, particularly when stage magic set out to emulate and explain the ways in which certain phenomena common to the séance could be produced. As Peter Lamont establishes, nineteenth-century audiences told the practices apart depending on what the conjuror claimed to be able to achieve – direct contact with spirits of the deceased or else illusions and tricks designed to replicate such acts.¹⁹ Both kinds of conjuring share much of the same imagery, in that things are made to appear and disappear seemingly of their own accord. This imagery is apparent in many texts that feature the ancient Egyptian supernatural. In H. Rider Haggard’s Cleopatra (1889), the

protagonist Harmachis communes with the goddess Isis, who appears before him as a

‘dark cloud upon the altar’ which ‘grew white […] shone, and seemed at length to take

18 Mangan, Dark Arts, p. 132.

19 Peter Lamont, ‘Spiritualism and a Mid-Victorian Crisis of Evidence’, The Historical Journal, 47.4 (2004), 897-920 (p. 906).

the shrouded shape of a woman’.²⁰ Surrounded by ‘bright eyes’, ‘strange whispers’

and ‘vapours [that] burst and melted’, the descriptions of what Harmachis sees might equally apply to a séance in a fashionable London drawing room, or as David

Huckvale suggests, a Masonic initiation ceremony.²¹ The ancient Egyptian spiritual rite and the cosmopolitan Victorian experience of the supernatural ritual are

rendered virtually indistinguishable. Haggard himself attended séances in his youth, and although he claimed to have ridiculed these experiences at the time, they appear to have made a strong impression on his perception of spirit materialisations.²² Later, when Isis appears again, she takes the form of ‘the horned moon, gleaming faintly in the darkness, and betwixt the golden horns rested a small dark cloud, in and out of which the fiery serpent climbed’.²³ With Isis’s entrance and exit heralded by the music of invisible sistra and her voice emerging from within the cloud, Haggard may have been alluding to the common séance phenomena of disembodied voices and music, the latter being famously demystified by the escapologist and illusionist Harry Houdini in 1898, when he played musical instruments while tied to a chair.

Harmachis, like the psychic medium, can summon the forms of spirits, requesting

‘that the chamber be a little darkened’, ‘the curtains […] drawn and the chamber made as though the twilight were at hand’ in order to perform his illusion.²⁴ He summons

‘the shape of royal Caesar […] on his form a vestment bloody from a hundred wounds’

who materialises first as ‘a cloud’ which takes the shape of a man ‘vaguely mapped

20 H. Rider Haggard, Cleopatra (London: Longmans, Green, and co, 1894), p. 69.

21 Haggard, Cleopatra, pp. 62, 69; Huckvale, Ancient Egypt, p. 151.

22 Tamsin Kilner O’Byrne, ‘Empire of the Imagination: Victorian Popular Fiction and the Occult, 1880-1910’ (unpublished doctoral thesis, University of Exeter, 2008), p. 291.

23 Haggard, Cleopatra, pp. 258-59.

24 Ibid., p. 111.

upon the twilight, and seemed now to grow and now to melt away’.²⁵ Harmachis makes the image dematerialise after a mere instant, admitting that it was nothing more than a ‘shadow’, a virtual image projected from his own imagination.²⁶ It is appropriate that Harmachis, in assuming the role of the illusionist, controls his magic using an ebony wand tipped with ivory, a playful wink to the black and white magic wand which is now universally symbolic of illusory performance. This variety of wand was allegedly first used by the innovative French magician Jean Eugène Robert-Houdin in the early 1800s (from whom Robert-Houdini took his stage name).²⁷ To Haggard’s credit, the ancient Egyptians did use magic wands in their rituals (the earliest

surviving examples date from around 2800 BC), and while his use of a black and white magic wand is anachronistic, he does take care to describe this relatively modern magical apparatus as constructed from suitably exotic materials.²⁸ Ancient Egyptian wands were, after all, usually made from ivory taken from hippopotami.²⁹ As a result, Haggard maintains a degree of historical accuracy, while injecting an element of nineteenth-century magical convention, closely aligning the two practices. Magic wands were also used by groups dedicated to the pursuit of ancient Egyptian lore, including the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn.

The history of ancient Egyptian magic was having a profound impact on modern illusory practices. Modern stage magic inherited a greater sense of legitimacy through its direct links to ancient Egyptian ritual and illusory conventions, interplay evident

25 Ibid., pp. 111-12.

26 Ibid., p. 112.

27 Joe Lantiere, The Magician’s Wand: A History of Mystical Rods of Power (Oakville, CT: Joe Lantiere Books, 2004), p. 122.

28 Fergus Fleming and Alan Lothian (eds.), Ancient Egypt’s Myths and Beliefs (Rosen: New York, 2012), p. 124.

29 Lantiere, Magician’s Wand, p. 74; Fleming and Lothian, Myths and Beliefs, p. 124.

not just in Haggard’s novel, but also within broader cultural contexts. Although not apparent in the novel’s illustrations, Haggard also describes Harmachis as wearing ‘a cap […] about which were broidered images of the stars’.³⁰ Haggard was certainly not the first to project the trappings of modern wizardry back onto ancient Egypt. In ‘The Flight into Egypt’ (1881), a poem by Francis Sylvester Mahoney, a gypsy well versed in magic and able to communicate ‘with the ghosts of the Pharaohs’ wears ‘a robe embroider’d with stars’.³¹ Conforming to the stereotypical image of the sorcerer and also suggestive of the Egyptian goddess Nut whose naked body, blue and covered in stars, was meant to form the night sky, contemporary and ancient images overlap and converse.³² In Haggard and Mahoney, magical ability is symbolically represented in the vestments of the ancient Egyptian conjurors; they wear costumes designed to impress, similar to the glitzy, spangled outfits donned by stage performers. Magic, whether genuine or illusion, is all in the performance. Consequently, Haggard presents both illusion and the genuine spiritual vision of divinity in his novel using the same images and tropes, from discourses claiming to be real supernatural experiences and illusory performance. Blending historically accurate details of ancient Egyptian magic with their modern counterparts, he appears to delight in confusing notions of time and space in a way that itself references ancient Egypt’s impact on a variety of magical discourses. ”?)

30 Haggard, Cleopatra, p. 101.

31 Francis Sylvester Mahoney, ‘The Flight into Egypt’ in A Shattered Visage Lies, ed. by Donald P. Ryan (Bolton: Rutherford Press, 2007), 108-10 (p. 108).

32 The image of the body or clothing covered in stars as symbolic of magical ability or mystical intellect has a long history. Urania, the Greek muse of astronomy, is frequently depicted wearing a cloak embroidered with stars.

Algernon Blackwood’s short story ‘The Nemesis of Fire’ (1908) also adopts the conventions of the séance and stage magic to depict ancient Egyptian supernatural forces. Blackwood describes the materialisation of a fire elemental which was originally conjured by ancient Egyptian necromancers to protect a mummy. At midnight, the elemental is summoned in a darkened room lit only by red lamps and with an offering in the form of a bowl of blood. Sat at a round table and taking each other’s hands, the participants experience a plethora of typical séance phenomena, beginning with the subtle sensations of the skin being touched with ‘a silken run’.³³

In document Estudio de Impacto Ambiental Ex Post (página 69-72)